[EVO 4G General] moxlon69:
I'm not going to contribue to a flame war, all I can really say on the subject is

that if he absolutely refuses to let you root his phone, that's his choice. From

your own admission you already 'damaged' one of his phones from rooting

and perhaps that is why he doesn't want you to do it?

That said, I've had the overclock lockup, and for me the fix was as simple as

booting into recovery, wiping cache/dalvik and rebooting. I got to go back in

and set a lower clock speed. His advantages for rooting would include, but are

not limited to some of the following;

The ability to do complete backups,

Overclocking / Underclocking

Removing CarrierIQ's spyware via custom roms.

Custom roms in general,

Better performance,

The ability to remove carrier bloat that he may or may not use.

A popular, but often abused reason is for wireless tethering without

paying the usual monthly fee associated with it. I only mention this

because I feel paying for unlimited data, you should be able to use that

data any way you see fit. I do not advocate ripping off said carriers, or

abusing wireless tethering by streaming tons of movies and crap.

I usually use around 1gb/month of my unlimited data, and that's using

the phone for work as well as leisure.

The advantages to remaining stock/unrooted;

Stability. You can all argue this point till you are blue in the face,

stock unrooted phones may have their issues, but they are generally

the most stable, if not sluggish at times.

Warranty protection/Insurance protection. I'm not sure if carrier insurance

will cover damage caused by rooting and flashing, but I know that the

carriers and manufacturers will not honor a factory warranty on a modified

device, with the exception of devices that they just can't physically verify

were modified. Plain fact is that any factory warranty is void the moment

you modify the device, and in my opinion, rightly so. You wouldn't hire a

contractor to rebuild your kitchen, then change all of the plumbing and tell

him that he has to come warranty the work that you modified after he left,

and if you did, he'd probably laugh at you. I actually witnessed this a lot,

working as a PC tech, people would buy brand new boxes, open them to

install some new hardware, damage them and expect warranty repairs...

There's also evidence that, at least in some cases, some manufacturers can

tell if you've flashed and returned to stock. Not sure about HTC but some

samsung devices for example count how many times the kernel has been

flashed.

The short answer is that this is up to him.

Would I root any given android device? If it's mine, yeah it's going to be rooted.

Would I root someone else's device? Only if they want it rooted. I might offer to

root and tell them some of the advantages, but I also always clearly state the

disadvantages and risks of rooting and/or flashing custom roms and kernels.

I never press the issue. If they don't want it, they just don't want it and none of

us have the right to pressure people into something they just don't want or

need.

Whatever arguments you decide to use when you bring it up again, is your

choice, but PLEASE be sure to include both sides of the argument, or have him

do his own research. If he still does not want you to root the phone, leave it

at that. Nobody likes being pushed around, especially by their own children.

My old man refused to let me root his phone, till he saw how well mine ran,

and how stable it was once modified. Only then (about a month after the fact)

did he ask for his phone to be rooted. And he's happy enough that he doesn't

really want to upgrade to a new device.